Junior Caminero hit a pair of tape-measure home runs and drove in three runs and Jonathan Aranda also homered twice to lead the Tampa Bay Rays to a 6-2 victory over the visiting Minnesota Twins in the opener of a three-game series on Friday night.
It was the fifth career multi-homer game for Caminero, who has hit six home runs during a nine-game hitting streak.
Drew Rasmussen (2-0) picked up the win, allowing one run on five hits over six innings. He walked one and struck out six. Bryan Baker retired all three batters he faced in the ninth for his fifth save.
Brooks Lee homered and doubled in a 3-for-4 game and Royce Lewis also homered for Minnesota, which took its seventh loss in the last eight games
Taj Bradley (3-1), traded by Tampa Bay to Minnesota at the last year’s trade deadline for reliever Griffin Jax, allowed six runs on seven hits over 6 1/3 innings in his first start against the team that drafted him in the fifth round of the 2018 MLB Draft.
Bradley, who came into the contest third in the American League with a 1.63 ERA, allowed four homers after giving up none in his first five starts of the season.
Tampa Bay took a 1-0 lead in the first inning on a 450-foot blast over the batter’s eye in center field by Caminero, the longest home run of his career.
The Rays extended the lead to 2-0 in the third inning when Nick Fortes led off with a double, was moved to third on a sacrifice bunt by Taylor Walls and scored on a groundout to first by Chandler Simpson.
Aranda led off the bottom of the fourth with a home run down the right field line to make it 3-0, but the Twins cut the lead to 3-1 in the fifth on Lee’s fourth home run.
Aranda led off the sixth with his second homer of the game and sixth of the season, a 414-foot drive deep into the bleachers in right to make it 4-1. Tampa Bay then broke the game open in the seventh when Caminero clubbed a two-run homer, this one a 435-foot drive off the batter’s eye in center, to extend the lead to 6-1.
Lewis ended the scoring with a leadoff homer down the left field line in the ninth off reliever Trevor Martin.
–Field Level Media
